Native mobile app - possible approaches?

[alainkaiser]

Hei :)

First of all, thanks for the wonderful implementation. After some research and setup I got it working locally and also tested it via mailhog. Works pretty good in the web.

What I'm wondering now: We are planning to implement a native mobile app (App Store and Google Play Store). The current idea is that we want to build the login screens ourselves and use the Magic Link approach. The user would log in as follows:

• User opens the native app
• User enters email and confirms with a button
• User is redirected to a "waiting" screen where he is informed that he should check his emails
• As soon as the user clicks on the magic link, the app is opened and the user is redirected to the next screen.

For me it is quite clear that you could use something like deep links for the redirect to the app from the email. You could modify the email templates, for example.

However, I have no idea what should then happen or how I can get a token within the native app using the Magic Link.

Have you had any experience with this? Resp. is this approach even possible with this extension / plugin? I would be grateful for any feedback.

[xgp]

The magic link continuation implementation works kind of like what you want. The initial login page "polls" to see if the link has been clicked somwhere.

You could likely do a similar thing inside your application, but this implementation won't do it for you. If you figure it out and want to contribute it, please reopen this with your findings.

[alainkaiser]

@xgp Thanks for your response. I am just wondering:

If I don't wanna use the templates from keycloak and just implement the entire flow manually, where can I get an overview of the endpoints I can work with? I mean in the docs of this repo, I saw the /magic-link endpoint, but a lot of things are not clear for me.

Sample request (replace your access token):

curl --request POST https://keycloak.host/auth/realms/test/magic-link \
 --header "Accept: application/json" \
 --header "Content-Type: application/json" \
 --header "Authorization: Bearer <access_token>" \
 --data '{"email":"foo@foo.com","client_id":"account-console","redirect_uri":"https://keycloak.host/auth/realms/test/account/","expiration_seconds":3600,"force_create":true,"update_profile":true,"update_password":true,"send_email":false}'

Questions:

• What do I pass as an access token in this case? I mean the user should just input the mail and then we should hit that endpoint to generate a magic link. What I am missing?

After, when I look at the sample response from the endpoint call above, it is something like that:

{
  "user_id": "386edecf-3e43-41fd-886c-c674eea41034",
  "link": "https://keycloak.host/auth/realms/test/login-actions/action-token?key=eyJhbG...KWuDyE&client_id=account-console",
  "sent": false
}

There is the actual magic link as a link. But how do I continue from there within the native app? I mean the link will be sent to the users email, he clicks on it and gets redirected to the native app via a deeplink or something like that. But what should happen next? Can I extract some infos from the magic link to hit the next endpoint?

I hope it is not too confusing...

[xgp]

That endpoint returns the link as well as optionally sends the link to the user's email. Once the user clicks on that link, they are authenticated, and redirected to the redirect_uri. The normal behavior is that the application at that redirect_uri does a normal code-to-token flow, which "just works" because the user is already SSO logged in.

But what should happen next?

No idea.

Can I extract some infos from the magic link to hit the next endpoint?

I don't think that would be helpful. There is not "endpoint" to "hit".

It's a neat use case, but really way out of scope of what this is designed to do. If you figure out a way to use some piece of what is here and care to share, please post your solution.